Starting Over

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I know at least a couple of people have looked at this blog. Not that it has any mysterious Sethmagnetic properties. I shamelessly promoted it on the new Seth Network International (SNI). In response I got gracious emails from Linda and Michael at SNI. I responded to Linda, reiterating my pugnatious stance about experimenting with Seth's ideas. She wrote back and thought disagreed with me. As "luck" would have it, I was then away from the computer for several days which gave me time to reflect as opposed to blabbing back immediately.
I am a science guy and I did spend close to twenty years getting Seth and Science to fit somewhat comfortably together. But, I also use the science/empiricist approach to inoculate myself against true believers. It's probably a failing of mine that I'm very, very impatient with folks who won't pursue basic, hard questions. Nevertheless, my first posts were lazy. So, I'm starting over. Still, in some way it just doesn't seem fair to erase the earlier posts. They're also a record and deserve their time in the sun.
Here's the best I've got...
After the first blush of the Seth material wore off the question that haunted me most was, "Is it true?" For something like twenty-five years that seemed like a perfectly reasonable question. But, that question can't finally be answered from a science perspective. Any test that we might conduct can always go awry because our understanding is imperfect or because Seth's ideas are wrong. There's no way to tell the difference. Over the course of the last few years I've come to a very different understanding. It's not easy to explain but here goes. Let's ask a different question, "Is Impressionism true?" I think everyone can sense that there's something goofy about that question. I believe that the Seth material and Impressionism are frameworks for creativity. Christianity was a creative framework for Bach, European history for Shakespeare, and Science for Einstein. It goes deeper than that. The roles we choose in life - mother, father, ballerina, astronaut, blogger - these too, are creative frameworks. Creative frameworks aren't distinguished by relative truth or falsity. Einstein's science was no truer than Bach's Christianity or Shakespeare's history. The differences lie in the kinds of opportunities for creativity they offer.
Now to Linda's specific disagreement. She said she didn't think the Seth material could ever fail or that we could ever fail with it. Imagine I decide to paint an Impressionist portrait of my granddaughter. Can either I or Impressionism fail in that endeavor? Not exactly. That's the same kind of goofy question. Surely, just painting the picture is valuable (or value fulfillment). But, I can fail to take advantage of the creative opportunities that Impressionism gives me to express my love, to hint at the fleeting nature of one earth life, to somehow real-ize the light-made-flesh nature of my granddaughter. I'm not sure how to express it but some pictures turn out "better" than others. There are differences between artistic endeavors but there are probably more fertile ways to identify the poles of those differences than "success" and "failure".
Two final things. If you're lonely, poor, or sick I imagine this seems like so much hot air. In future posts I'll try to show how, in fact, this approach can help you change how you feel. Finally, "Thanks, Linda!" for the whack upside the head.